[MichaelCollins]

Such a term would be poison to most game developers, particularly in the early days of Steam when it had nothing more than a handful of first party games. Before Steam achieved market dominance, how would they have convinced third party developers to accept it?

Unless somebody shows me that term in the contracts, I don't believe it exists. It doesn't make sense for it to exist; the only reason to think it does is because you like Gabe and don't think he would lie to you.

[prepend]

It seems reasonable for developers (as I’m not a developer) as Steam was just selling licenses.

It would be the equivalent of Walmart saying they would let people buy copies of games and run them forever.

So it makes sense that Steam would be able to make it so the games sold keep running without Steam existing. It seems pretty simple technically too as they would just update their client to no longer phone home to Steam.

[Aeolun]

> how would they have convinced third party developers to accept it?

Present it as a feature?

“In the event of the dissolution of Steam/Valve, we will endeavour to do everything reasonable to ensure that previously purchased licenses to your content keep working for subscribers in the absence of the Steam platform.”

Just because they try to keep it working doesn’t mean they have to make it DRM free (e.g. copyable between all computers without any checks).